Biochemicals from forestry biomass

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Microorganisms have been used for thousands of years to produce desirable chemicals, ranging from the molecules that give taste to cheeses to the ethanol in beer or wine. These chemicals can be complex or simple, but all are essentially derived from simple sugars by the metabolism of microbes. Today we have the capacity to develop this type of metabolic manipulation to a new level, by creating new metabolic pathways in microbes to make chemicals we find useful but that the microbes do not naturally produce. This allows us the potential of both replacing petroleum-derived chemicals with green, sustainable chemicals, and directing the products of the forestry pulp industry away from the increasingly low value production of newsprint to the production of such valuable chemicals. The Biochemicals from Forestry Biomass project will engineer the capacity of yeasts to turn sugars derived from the processing of wood fibre into adipic acid, a chemical building block of the commercially valuable polymer nylon.